by Jonathan Thomson / Hong Kong in Transition 1995 – 2020: An open access photographic archive for anyone interested in Hong Kong and its history The word “monument” comes directly from the Latin monumentum, literally “something that reminds”, and is derived from monere: to remind. This etymology suggests a monument allows us to see the past in order to better visualise what might come in the future. The alternative, proposed by philosopher George Santayana, is that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. However, not all monuments are sculptural, and Hong Kong now has another, in the virtual archive of more than 40,000 photographs by Hong Kong photographer David Clarke that has been established as an adjunct to the Hong Kong Art Archive of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Clarke has been documenting and analysing Hong Kong’s transition beyond colonial rule in words and pictures, both as a professor of art history at the University of Hong Kong and as a …